I walked on, down the narrow winding street that led to the House of Swans, past blind walls mounted with sconces and the remnants of torches and scrawled with graffiti, political or obscene or sometimes both together. (P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO FOR QUAESTOR, A MAN YOU CAN TRUST, read one in an elegant hand, and next to it, hastily scrawled, P. CORNELIUS SCIPIO WOULD CHEAT A BLIND WHORE AND GIVE HER AN UGLY BABY.)
I passed the dead-end alley where Magnus and his two henchmen had lain in wait. I stepped around the dim bloodstain that marked the place where old Sextus Roscius had died. It was even duller than it had been on the day of my first visit, but not hard to locate, as the space all around it was markedly clean in contrast to the grimy cobblestones that filled the street. Someone had been out washing the very spot, scrubbing and scrubbing, trying to eliminate it once and for all. The job must have taken hours, and all for nothing — if anything, the spot was more conspicuous than before, and all the passing feet and soot-laden winds that had soiled it once would have to soil it again to make it disappear once more into the street. Who had worked here for hours on hands and knees (in the middle of the day? in the middle of the night?) with a scouring rag and a pail, desperately trying to wipe out the past? The shopkeeper's wife? The widowed mother of the mute boy? I imagined Magnus himself doing it, and almost laughed at the idea of the glowering assassin down on his hands and knees like a scrub maid.
I stooped down, brought my face near to the ground and stared into the flat stones and the tiny flecks of blackened red trapped in every fissure and pit. This was the very stuff that had given life to Sextus Roscius, the same blood that flowed in the veins of his sons, the same blood that heated the body of young Roscia, standing warm and naked against a dark wall in my memory; the same blood that must have run down her thighs when her father broke her maidenhead; the same blood that would burst from his own flesh when and if a Roman court saw fit to have him publicly scourged and then sewn up alive in a sack full of wild beasts. I stared into the stain until it grew so vast and deep that I could see nothing else, but even then it gave no answers, revealed nothing about either the living or the dead.
I unbent myself, groaning as my legs and back reminded me of last night's leap. I stepped forward just enough to peer into the gloomy shop. The old man sat behind the counter at the back, propping his head on his elbow, his eyes shut. The woman fussed about the sparsely stocked shelves and tables. The shop exhaled a dank, cool breath into the sunlit street, tinged with sweet rot and musk. I went into the tenement across the street. The downstairs watchman was nowhere in sight. His little partner at the top of the stairs was asleep with his drooling mouth wide open and a half-full cup of wine in his hand, tilted just enough so that he spilled a few drops with each snore.
Inside my tunic I fingered the hilt of the knife the boy had given me. I paused for a long moment, wondering what I could say to either of them. To the widow Polia that I knew the name of the men who had raped her? That one of them, Redbeard, was dead? To little Eco that he could take back his knife, because I had no intention of killing Magnus or Mallius Glaucia for him?
I walked down the long, dark hallway. Every board I stepped on creaked and groaned above the muffled voices from the cubicles. Who would huddle inside in the dark in the middle of such a day? The sick, the old, the infirm and crippled, the weak and starving, the lame. Ancients beyond any use, infants unable yet to walk. There was no reason that Polia and her son should be home at all, and yet my heart caught in my throat as I rapped on the door.
A young girl pulled the door wide open, giving me a view of the whole room. An ancient crone huddled amid blankets in one corner. A little boy knelt in the open window. He glanced over his shoulder at me, then went back to watching the street below. Except for its size and shape, everything about the room was different.
Two watery eyes looked out from the blankets. 'Who is it, child?'
'I don't know, Grandmother.' The little girl stared at me suspiciously.
'What do they want?'
The little girl made an exasperated face. 'My grandmother says, what do you want?' 'Polia,'I said.
'Not here,' said the boy in the window. 'I must have the wrong room.'
'No,' said the little girl crossly. 'Right room. But she's gone.'
'I mean the young widow and her son, the little mute boy.'
'I know that,' she said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile. 'But Polia and Eco aren't here any more. First she left, and then he left,'
'Gone,' added the old woman from the corner. 'That's how we finally got this room. Lived across the hall before, but this room is bigger.- Big enough for all five of us — my son and his wife and the two little ones.'
'I like it better like this, when Mommy and Daddy are out and it's just us three,' said the boy.
'Shut up, Appius,' snapped the girL 'One day Mommy and Daddy will go out and never come back, just like happened to Eco. They'll disappear, like Polia. You'll run them off because you're always crying. We'll see how you like that.'
The little boy started crying. The old woman clucked her tongue. 'What do you mean?' I said. 'Polia left without taking the boy?'
'Abandoned him,' said the old woman. 'I don't believe it.'
She shrugged. 'Couldn't pay the rent. The landlord gave her two days to get out. The next morning she was gone. Took everything she could carry and left the boy all alone to fend for himself. Next day the landlord showed up, took what little was left of their things, and threw the boy into the street. Eco hung around here for a few days. People felt sorry for him, gave him scraps to eat. But the doorkeepers finally ran him off. Are you a relative?'
'No.'
'Well, if Polia owed you money, you'd best forget it'
'We didn't like them, anyway,' said the little girl. 'Eco was stupid. Couldn't say a word, even when Appius would hold him down and sit on him and I'd tickle him till he turned blue. He'd just make a noise like a pig.'
'Like a pig getting poked,' said the little boy, suddenly laughing instead of crying. 'That's what Daddy said.'
The old woman scowled. 'Shut up, both of you.'
Business was brisk at the House of Swans, especially for so near to midday. The proprietor attributed the traffic to a slight change in the weather. 'The heat riles them all up, sets a man's blood boiling — but too much heat can cause even a vigorous man to wilt. Now that the weather is at least tolerable again, they're back in droves. All those pent-up fluids. You're certain you have no interest in the Nubian? She's new, you know. Ah!' He gave a sigh of relief as a tall, well-dressed man entered the vestibule from the inner corridor. The sigh meant that Electra was no longer occupied and would be able to see me, which meant that the tall stranger must have been her previous client. He was a handsome man of middle age with touches of grey at the temples. He made only a faint, compressed smile of satisfaction as he nodded to our mutual host. I felt a stupid twinge of jealousy and told myself that the reason he smiled with his mouth shut was because his teeth were bad.